Inside the last envelope was more than just a letter. The plastic covering on Mother’s key chain was scratched, but I could still make out the faded picture of Wayne Gretzky.

The summer Mother left us, he was constantly in the news. Auntie Choo Neo gawked at Janet Jones’s wedding headdress, calling her a gold digger, like she had done before with the sultan’s favourite wife. I watched Gretzky in a grey and white striped shirt on television, surrounded by a bouquet of microphones like wilted steel peacock feathers, as he announced through tears that he was leaving the Edmonton Oilers. Father sneered, “If he’s stupid enough to leave Canada, he doesn’t deserve his status as a Canadian!” But as Coach Glen Sather said, “Everything changes, we all get older,” Bea and I wept openly. Gretzky’s announcement felt like a betrayal. But more than that, it reminded me of Mother, and how I didn’t want to grow up without her. At least Gretzky said goodbye.

Years later, sitting on an airplane, staring at this hazy plastic picture of the Great One, I began to feel something different. I still remembered the sadness, but I also saw the blurred memories of us hugging after a goal, or Mother’s arm around me on the couch during a game. It was like she was handing me a happy memory, reminding me there were good times to recall and cherish.

After I tucked the last letter back into its envelope, I leaned back to rest my head against the seat. I thought about my last day in Ipoh, the point on the trip when I felt the lowest. I had thought that the heat and the exertion from walking through the cemetery looking for Mother’s tombstone had made my breath laboured and my chest tight. Truthfully, it was my fury at her for starting a new life and forgetting us. She had erased us from her life so effectively that Peter couldn’t even find us to tell us the news of her death. She considered us strangers, unworthy of remembering.

When I first landed in Asia, I wanted so badly to find out where she was. And I did. But it wasn’t enough. What I wanted most of all was to know that she thought of us, that she missed us, that she loved us still. As I collected the many stories of Mother, it was apparent that she was in turmoil, in pain, about being away from her home, but it was unclear to me whether she was also torn about her distance from us in Canada. Now, it felt like I had all the ingredients to fashion a dish—unrehearsed, improvised, and spontaneous—that would soothe me and allow me to eventually embrace forgiveness.

These letters were the last remnants of a four-spice tong. The big soup pot was stripped of the lotus root, the chicken. All that was left was a bit of broth, the flat black pieces of rehmannia, soggy clumps of angelica root, and a few strips of a white peony. Yet the brew was still pungent. When I was little, my mother would use the last of the tong to start a new batch, carrying over some of the deep flavour that had simmered in the old soup. Mother told me it was good for a tong to have memory, for that richness to fold into the new.